Putting Down Roots

New York Architects Help Well Traveled Couple Cope With Loft

NEW YORK — In the more than 25 years they've been married, Steven and Judith O'Connor have moved 18 times.

They have lived in a small nondescript apartment in Iran with a Turkish toilet and in a heavily shuttered home in Athens, shortly after the collapse of the military regime.

Then there was the cedar-paneled house overlooking a sound in Bermuda, the tile-roofed hacienda in Phoenix and the Provencal-suburban manor in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

Finally, just a honk from the Holland Tunnel, they're putting down roots, in a loft building in TriBeCa. But for the first time, the couple say, they're in terra incognita, a landscape mapped by architects.

Where once they traveled freely with little more than what they could stow under an airplane seat, now their roots are planted in blue Brazilian granite, laminated glass and blackened steel plate.

Rolling stones they may be, but they have brought plenty of moss to this new frontier of bold, sleek architecture: personal penates and mementos, gathered over years of wandering.

In the absence of a permanent residence, it was their things -- Oaxacan clay figurines, Persian carpets, a whirlwind of blown glass by the artist Dale Chihuly -- that defined them. At last, they were ready for a space of their own, but they didn't want it to be a curio cabinet.

They were ready -- but not prepared -- when Adam Yarinsky and Stephen Cassell of the downtown firm Architecture Research Office, offered a vision. In Yarinsky's words, it was of a wide open space responding to "the daily and seasonal cycles of the sun, where materials, not walls, would create limits."

For starters, the entrance isn't even a door. Instead, a massive 5-by-8-foot pivoting panel of steel, acid-washed and waxed to a blackened sheen, sweeps open to reveal at a glance 4,000 square feet of open floor surrounded on all sides by windows and punctuated by three operatic gestures: a glass-and-steel staircase, a towering wall of blue Bahia granite and a three-story atrium of translucent glass.

Was the marriage of these color-loving, stuff-hoarding world travelers and these spare-leaning, Adolf Loos-talking Modernist architects a union made in heaven or a case study for "Can This Marriage Be Saved?"

"I wanted a place that when I woke up in the morning and walked around, I'd see something different every time," Mrs. O'Connor said. "I wanted a space that would get me thinking."

At first, Steven and Judith O'Connor would not appear to be likely clients for Type A architecture. He's a burly guy who wears plaid shirts to work and likes to shoot pool and watch hockey games with his 14-year-old son. Now 48, he started out as an alternative-school teacher but switched, midcareer, to the financial world and made enough money to be able to afford an apartment costing upward of $4 million.

His wife, who trained as a graphic designer, has a craftsman's love of the handmade and a pack rat's tendency to accumulate. She abhors e-mail, and in the morning can be found dressed in voluminous print skirts and sensible rubber shoes, sitting at the kitchen counter writing letters in longhand. She is the first to admit that her aesthetic and that of her architects are somewhat at odds.

"Maybe it's from years of being in Iran, where the mosques and the bazaars dazzle you with so much visual texture and intricate patterning, but I like lots of color and a bit of a clutter," said Mrs. O'Connor, 47. "I'm not bothered by stuff, and I know how that drives architects crazy."

The Manhattan architects met while apprentice designers in the office of Steven Holl and set up their own firm five years ago. Their diverse clients range from Biotherm, the cosmetics company, to the Pentagon, for which they built the recruiting station that reopened this fall in Times Square, to the Cooper-Hewitt museum (they designed the 1997 Henry Dreyfuss exhibition).

Cassell, 36, and Yarinsky, 37, have established themselves as the kind of young architects -- brainy and modern but not afraid of their inner sensualists -- that everyone wants on the short list for new projects.

Color was a sticking point. The homeowners wanted more; the architects said that less was more.

Mrs. O'Connor recalls: "I kept telling Adam: `This is too bland, this is too blank. I know what you're going for, but I need more interest when I look at something."'

Of the Brazilian blue wall with its bold black veins, the yellow silk curtain wall in the bedroom, the red-and-silver screening room, the grass-green rug (not yet installed), and the cobalt, turquoise and gold glass bathroom tiles, Yarinsky said only: "It's true. I'm more of a minimalist than they are."